Stop the mad rush and smell the flowers

• If you are like everyone around you, your life is probably one thankless mad rush. You get up early in the morning to beat Nairobi’s eternal traffic jam, your day passes in a blur of monotonous activity and by the time you get home, you are too tired to spend quality time with your loved ones. Is it really worth it?

Nobody relishes an analogy involving rats. But that’s what our lives seem to have boiled down to; rats running a wheel. Life has become like a treadmill and we’re working up a good sweat, only we aren’t moving. Not literally at least.

We ravage life with an unsettling urgency. Nobody stops to pick and smell a flower.

Where is the time? We drink and drive. We eat foods that will not see us to old age, foods that will make our kids diabetic at 12yrs.

We have sex without condoms. We spend more time in the trenches chasing the penny than we spend with our loved ones.

We don’t exercise. We drink. Daily.

We don’t kiss our children enough and we leave them to grow in the hands of strangers. We don’t pray. Church passes us in a head-splitting daze of hangover.

Our friendships are fleeting and uncertain, but even when they hold we refuse to actively nurture them. Where is the time? We are possessed by consuming ambition, and we unapologetically step on anyone or anything that stands in our way.

We have replaced virtue with passion and it seems to offer a reason to all the ills that burden our lives. This is our life; it’s the only life we know but is it quality life? Is this the ultimate redemption, this relentless pursuit of hedonism?

Felix Murathe had a heart attack three months ago. He is only 30. A freelance web developer, he often burnt the midnight oil pushing on until 2am. Lucky for him, on that fateful night he had decided to sleep at his girlfriend’s house.

Naturally, he carried his laptop (he carried it everywhere, he admits) with him to do an hour before turning in. They had dinner at 9pm; beef, potatoes and rice. Shortly before midnight he propped up in bed and started working. The pain came an hour later.

“It felt like someone was squeezing my heart in their fist, the pain was out of this world,” he explains.
He remembers waking up in the hospital five hours later, and for the next month, he lay in a hospital bed having come an inch of death.

Felix isn’t overweight.
“Coming so close to death is a moment of clarity. Everything that you thought and imagined as important all of a sudden becomes so trivial.”

He says sipping milk from a wine glass in his house. “ I always had what I call my “Pivot of 35” agenda, which is basically to have my own a successful web development company at 35, and everything I did was tunnel-visioned towards this target.

Nothing else mattered; when I wasn’t working I was drinking or sleeping.
After this heart experience, Pivot of 35 doesn’t seem too urgent anymore, I let it possess me and it nearly killed me.

My doctor sat me for an hour when I was being discharged and he told me, I was killing myself, that I needed to pay attention to my body.
“So what has changed now?” I ask.